Relax and be fun, Mr. President

Abdul Khalik ,  The Jakarta Post ,  Jakarta   |  Thu, 04/10/2008 11:24 PM  |  National

To keep people from falling asleep during his speeches, communication experts have advised President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono to be relaxed and use jokes to refresh his audiences.

"He should hire a consultant to provide him with fresh jokes so it is fun to listen to his speech. I think most leaders have done this," Effendi Gozali, a political communication expert at the University of Indonesia, told The Jakarta Post on Wednesday.

He advised the President to keep his speeches short as people had a limited capacity to follow a long speech.

"The President should keep his emotion under control, as it's very rare that a leader shows his or her outburst in public in such a case," Effendi said, referring to events a day earlier.

Yudhoyono was speaking before 86 mayors, regents and leaders of regional legislative councils in a workshop at the National Resilience Institute (Lemhannas) on Tuesday when he spotted a participant falling asleep. He pointed to the participant angrily and told him to leave the room if he wanted to sleep.

Indra J. Pilliang of the Centre for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) agreed with Effendi, saying the incident occurred because Yudhoyono's speech was "boring, normative and preaching".

"It was a boring session. They had come from faraway. The President should have anticipated the situation and been relaxed," he said.

Effendi said, however, he could understand why the President was angry, and that the sleeping participant should be scolded.

"It's difficult to understand why a regional official was sleeping when the President was speaking," he said.

Another political expert Indria Samego said such behavior shown by regional officials might be because they were voted into power by their people, and the President was no longer their boss.

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